Vary the Fonts in Your Outlines

For law students, the Thanksgiving holiday represents a much-needed break and an opportunity to spend time with family and friends who’ve been neglected for the past three-plus months. It’s also an opportunity to catch up on exam preparation, which generally begins two weeks after Turkey Day.

So, let’s talk outlining. Simply, outlines are condensed summaries of rules of law, which may incorporate course readings, cases, class notes, hypotheticals, and other information that students think their professors will want them to know.

In developing their outlines, students often ask me questions like:

“When should I start outlining?” (Earlier the better.)

“How do I organize the outline?” (Use the course’s syllabus or the casebook's table of contents as a guide.)

“Can I just use a commercial outline?” (No. You can supplement your own outline with a commercial outline, but don’t use it as a substitute for your own original outline.)

“What about an upperclassman’s outline?” (Again, no. See previous response.)

But a question that students almost never consider is:

“What font should I use?”

To which I boldly advise, “Comic Sans!”

Tim Harford, an economist and author of the book Messy: How To be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, believes that ugly fonts like Comic Sans help people concentrate on what they’re reading.

So, while I recommend to students that the bulk of their outline can be in the more popular Helvetica, Arial, or Times New Roman fonts, certain excerpts or rules should be in a completely different font, like Comic Sans—and not just the same font bolded, italicized, underlined, highlighted, or whatever means of making the same boring Helvetica, Arial, or Times New Roman font stand out more.

Harford referred to a previous study run by psychologists at Princeton University where a school teacher's handouts were reformatted in either easy-to-read or harder fonts.

"Those who got their handouts formatted in difficult, ugly fonts did better in their end of term exams across a variety of subjects," Harford pointed out.

Sure, the development of Comic Sans has led to the strongest anti-font movement currently in existence, with followers of the movement saying the font has no place in business or professional work usage. And that might be true.

But students aren’t filing their outlines with courts. They aren’t turning them in for grades. The outlines are designed to help students learn, memorize, and understand the vast amount of material covered over the course of the semester.

Whatever helps with that process, I advocate.

In fact, I rely on Comic Sans in my PowerPoint slides often, also utilizing different font color, sizes, and positioning to help emphasize the importance of the concepts I’m discussing.

Here are some examples:

The following slide reminds students to take into account the last clear chance doctrine when examining a question in which contributory negligence applies. Because contributory negligence is a relatively straight-forward concept, testing the applicability of the last clear chance doctrine, which acts as an exception to contributory negligence, adds a needed level of difficulty.

I use the next slide to remind students the importance of malice aforethought in determining whether a common law murder has been committed.

I use this final slide to highlight that the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress requires either "intent" or "recklessness." In other words, recklessness as to the effect of the defendant's conduct satisfies the intent requirement (which I always find ironic since IIED is the only intentional tort with "intent" in its name!).